The Life Cycle of Adpositions
Author
Adpositions are used, universally, to mark the roles of nominal participants in the verbal clause, most commonly indirect object roles. Practically all languages seem to have such markers, which begin their diachronic life as lexical words -- in this case either serial verbs or positional nouns. In many languages, however, adpositions also seem to have extended their diachronic life one step further, becoming verbal affixes. The main focus of this book is the tail-end of the diachronic life cycle of adpositions. That is, the process by which, having arisen first as nominal-attached prepositions or post-positions, they wind up attaching themselves to verbs. Our core puzzle is thus fairly transparent: How and why should morphemes that pertain functionally to nominals, and begin their diachronic life-cycle as nominal grammatical operators, wind up as verbal morphology? While the core five chapters of this book focus on the rise of verb-attached prepositions in Homeric Greek, its theoretical perspective is broader, perched at the intersection of three closely intertwined core components of the study of human language: (a) the communicative function of grammar; (b) the balance between universality and cross-language diversity of grammars; and (c) the diachrony of grammatical constructions, how they mutate over time. While paying well-deserved homage to the traditional Classical scholarship, this study is firmly wedded to the assumption, indeed presupposition, that Homeric Greek is just another natural language, spoken before written, designed as an instrument of communication, and subject to the same universal constraints as all human languages. And further, that those constraints--so-called language universals--express themselves most conspicuously in diachronic change. Lastly, in analyzing the synchronic variation and text distribution of prepositional constructions in Homeric Greek, this study relies primarily on the theory-laden method of Internal Reconstruction.
[Not in series, 236] 2021. xii, 205 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© T. Givón
Table of Contents
-
Acknowledgements | pp. ix–x
-
Preface | pp. ix–x
-
Chapter 1. How do nominal case-markers become verbal affixes? | pp. 1–32
-
Chapter 2. The diachronic baseline: Pre-nominal prepositions in Homeric Greek | pp. 33–64
-
Chapter 3. The diachronic target: Pre-verbal prepositions in Homeric Greek | pp. 65–88
-
Chapter 4. Detached (‘severed’) prepositions in Homeric Greek | pp. 89–108
-
Chapter 5. The pre-verbal ‘Augment’ e- in Homeric Greek as an earlier cycle of pre-verbal prepositions | pp. 109–144
-
Chapter 6. The pre-verbal ‘Augment’ e- in Homeric Greek when preceded by prepositions | pp. 145–168
-
Chapter 7. Mirror image: How English prepositions became post-verbal clitics | pp. 169–196
-
Bibliography | pp. 197–200
-
General index | pp. 201–208
-
Language index | p. 209
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CFF: Historical & comparative linguistics
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009010: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Historical & Comparative